Evaluation Task 2 - How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary texts?

1.In relation to star image, who is similar to the star you have tried to create and where do you draw influence from? (Taylor Swift, Jess Glynne, Ellie Goulding - influence from their videos).

 2.What are the key meanings you chose for your star image and what do these stand for? (Wanted our artist to be relatable to the target audience through clothing, young love and romance theme, organically synthetic so showed her in normal everyday life as well as studio).

3.How would you say your website, digipack and music video work together to reinforce the star meaning of your artist? (All focused on our artist, bright bold colour scheme in digipack and website that was professional as well as fun and girly because of the glitter theme to match the video, she can connect to fans on the website which ties into her presenting herself as relatable in her video).
4.In relation to your target audience, what would you say the genre of your music is and who would appeal to it? (Pop, younger, predominately female audience ages 15-25).

5.Do you feel your products are accessible to your target audience and link well to each other? (Yes, designed to be accessible, easy to use, all aspects in all three products apply to the target audience, complement each other you can find everything to need to know about the artist from all three combine).
6.Do you think your products relate to any of your target audience’s values and ideas in life? (yes, our target audience is in the stage of their life where they are starting to have relationships and explore that aspect of life, fun and free spirited which is an aspect in all the products, traditionalists – want to explore platonic and romantic relationships but also don’t want to grow up want to stay youthful without adult worries, therefore wanted to make video a realistic young relationship where couples may have ups and downs, continued through into digipak and website).
7.Do you believe the website is accessible enough to TA and how could it be more accessible? (Extremely simple, and easy to use. If you know how to navigate your way to a website which young people do now, it will be easy for our audience to navigate through the website. Links to social media on website also very accessible).
8.Do all your products cross-promote each other? (Yes, the themes in all relate, links and images of digipack on website to cross-promote. Links and actual video on website. The name on the digipack of artists and album means people can search this online and will immediately find website/video).

9.Where would you like your final product to be distributed and what media is currently being used for a cohesive marketing campaign for your artist? (Currently our artists is mainly marketed and promoted through YouTube as this is where her video is placed. As well as the shops in which her album is sold in and the website. In the future we would link to gain promotion through a Vevo account on YouTube for our artist as they are a well know company that post various minor and major artist’s videos on YouTube and audience’s recognise them, coverage in online blogs e.g.: Huffington Post and then possibly MTV).

The promotion of music is rarely all at the music. The music industry uses Visual Images as a key part of its marketing strategy. This is historically true for the Marketing of the Pop Music Video.

Keith Negus argues that the ‘pop music video is used as a promotional tool’. The star image used to brand the product. Branding is then used by the music industry to create a range of products for audiences across a range of genres and musical styles.

CD digipak covers are crucial artwork which markets the image of the artist, before the music is purchased. Music artist Websites are a common part of a marketing strategy, particularly in the online age.

Mike Masnick says artists must give the audience a reason to connect and they'll pay. Therefore, by selling our artist's star image through the main product and ancillary texts, fans can connect to her and will go on to purchase her music as well as her merchandise and tickets to her tour. Gerd Leonhard said the future of content is with the crowd and the cloud. This means artist should use the cloud to bypass the music industry to sell their products. Therefore, by selling Lila through the music video online, the website and her album which can be purchased or streamed and listened to online, her products are accessible to audiences through the cloud and this makes it easy for her to connect to them.

How important is the image of the artist?

The visual ‘star image’ according to Dyer, communicates important messages to the audience. Audience often associate the look of an artist to a style of music. It’s genre. Some audiences idolise bands and singers, and see them as sex symbols, fashion icons and celebrities.

Websites contain information which publicise and promotes the artist and a range of information to an audience- or its fan base. Often this is organised into what Boyd has termed co-option.

Media marketing of pop star image have become Iconic and famous. Iconic images have helped retain the popularity of existing and legendary artists.

This is a video describing the star image of our artist.
All music website are about promotion and information provided to the audience. They fall into three main categories:
1. Promotion of single or album release

     2.  Promotion of tour or live appearance

     3.  Merchandising –posters of an artist or band, sales T-shirt etc. 

CD digipack are carefully constructed according to convention to communicate certain messages about the artist. Images may consist of album cover, photographs of the band artist, graphic and texts.

When considering how to campaign is marketed at an audience, Phillip Kotler’s definition of marketing bears significance. ‘Human activity directed at a satisfying needs and wants through exchange processes’ this means the selling of products and services. Marketing consist of four variables:

    1.Price – how much the product will cost and how much is the consumer surplus

    2. Place- how is the product distributed and marketed to the target audience

    3.Product – what is being branded ( in this case the ‘star image’)

    4. Promotion- how is it being advertised, where and publicised.

    Our product would itself would be placed both physically and digitally in places HMV and Amazon alongside platforms such as Itunes and Spotfiy. We placed our song on Spotify which in turn will promote our artist and her brand so the audience will buy more of her products and music in the future.This is because, although some may prefer to buy a hard copy of the album, the majority of our target audience would choose to stream their music rather than own it, as they are a younger audience ages 15-25, and therefore  by having Lila's album online this gives them easy access to listen to her music how they prefer to. Lila is also signed to Sony Records who would release her album just in time for her tour so the audience can become familiar with her music before watching her perform live. 

On TV, Lila's music video would be shown on channels such as MTV, 4music and VIVA, that are on during the hours of 6-10pm, peak time for our age demographic of 15-25 to come home from work or school and can relax with Lila's music. These are also channels which people in our target audience watch and therefore this is why they would be the most appropriate channels for Lila's video to be shown on. If Lila's songs were played on the radio they would most likely be played on Capital FM. This is because Capital is a well known radio station that mostly plays pop music for a target audience similar to Lila's of ages around 15-25. 

The types of magazines Lila would feature in would include Teen Now, Marie Claire, Teen Vogue and Shout Magazine. This is because Lila's main target audience are the people who would read these types of magazines (females age 15-25). Also, to further Lila's marketing campaign she could feature in magazines in America such as Seventeen and Teen Vogue in the US to begin to developing a more widespread fan base that expands to other countries. 

Evaluation Task 1 - In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Keith Negus, a theorist on Star Image, proposed a list of conventions of how a music video should be. Following this list helped me create the ideal music video, and one that is sure to match genre and target audience conventions as well. Here are Negus' generic conventions of a music video:

• Clear promotion of the desired artist's "image"
• Appearance of the artist in the video
• Large variety of shot types
• One key theme followed that provides the structure, other smaller themes reoccurring
• Occasionally a narrative structure 
• Performance 
• Not always realistic 
• Shots cut to the beat of the track
• Special effects sometimes used (often lighting)
• Specific and carefully planned mise-en-scene
• High impact to compete for airplay

These are seen throughout many music videos. One example is Britney Spears's 'Baby One More Time' that features these elements frequently. 

This shows the close-up shots used in the video of the artist to sell her star image. These are mainly featured in the chorus which is the main part of the song that audiences usually remember and therefore they will associated the chorus with the artist. Furthermore, the audience will remember the artist. 

This highlights the element of lip sync in this video. The singing has been previously recorded and the then matched to the lip movements of the artist later in the editing process. This gives the appearance of a live performance and, in the case of this video, also enables the artist to perform a live dance number. 

There is almost always an element of performance in music videos. In this case it is a live dance routine performed by the solo artist along with extras and back-up dancers. This is to add something extra to the music video which attracts people to spend time to watch and acknowledge it and the artist.  

Lastly, there is usually a narrative in a music video. In this case, Britney Spears's music video is about her imagining life outside the classroom and the sense of freedom that comes with it. It follows the sequence of her sitting in the classroom daydreaming to then being let out outside the classroom and then finally her back in the classroom in the same position as the start of the video where it is then revealed that the whole situation is a dream. 

Looking at artists websites similar to ours

Brainstorm for digipak

These are some first ideas that we have been brainstorming for our digipak. They are all based around the theme of pictures as this is what our video will also be based around. We are trying to come up with an idea of how to present the digipak, for example to have the whole cover as one picture or to have a collage of pictures. We will choose the one that most suits the star image for our artist and that will attract our target audience. Our top two choices is the pop art style cover and the collage of polaroid pictures making up one whole picture.

These are some of the images we took on our shoot day for our digipak. We looked through these images as well as multiple others we took to decide the final ones we wanted to use on our digipak.

These are the rough measurements we will use for our digipak to ensure it is the appropriate size.

Account of editing

When editing, we had many shots which we had taken throughout our two shoot days.This meant we had to keep some and discard some. We decided to keep many close-up shots to address the artists star image and ensure she grabs the audiences attention as she is a new artist and we want the audience to remember her. Close-up shots of objects also helped to add to the narrative and ensure the audience understood it. We also kept shots such as panning and tracking shots to ensure we included a wide range of shots to make the video more interesting and intriguing to watch. We discarded shots which we felt were similar to ones we were already using and also ones that didn't show the mise-en-scene of the whole video the way we planned it to be. 

We combine the narrative element and the performance element using cross-cutting. We cut between the narrative element of a young couple's relationship and the performance element in the studio. We also used editing to make pictures of the couple come to life by zooming into still pictures to make them become the moving scene. 

The zooming was part of the special effects we learnt about whilst editing our music video. We also learnt how to use effects such as transitions (e.g. dissolves) and colour correcting to make the shots look more professional and high quality.

We cut the shots we decided to use to the beat in order to match the lip singing with the lyrics in the music. We ensured it was in time with the music by playing around with the shots that didn't match up in order to correct them. 

During the editing process we worked well as a group. We all took turns to edit parts of the video. We also helped each other if one of us was better at a particular aspect of editing than another in order to make sure the video was edited properly and well to get the best final piece. We all put in extra hours towards editing our video to ensure it would  finished to the best quality possible. 

At A2, we used many more special effects as described previously than what we used at AS in our thriller. The A2 editing process was also much more complex than at AS because of the lip syncing which we had to match to the music exactly. this was more difficult that at AS where we simply cut together the shots we were using.  

Overall, our editing skills improved greatly from AS to A2 as we had gained more practice and experience in how to edit a text properly and also how to include more complex things through editing into our product such as special effects which we were unable to do at AS. 

Account of shoot day

We began our shoot day by setting up the relevant equipment we needed and ensuring our artist and actor were dressed in the appropriate costume for our first shots. We practised using the camera in order to familiarise ourselves with it again after not having used it for a long period of time. We also established how to use the red head light having not used it previously. Our timeline and shot list were on hand to follow during the filming process in order to make filming easier as we had already decided what shots to use and what point in the song to use them. We decided to film our picture and bedroom scenes first and then our studio scenes later on so we didn't get confused from switching between the two. We came up with our shot choices by looking at what types of shots are used in music videos similar to ours. We also pictured what shots would look best for the types of scenes we were filming and tried to come up with a range of shots to make the video more interesting and enjoyable for our audience to watch. We proceeded to draw our storyboard including the shot types for follow when filming and we made this into an animatic to see roughly the length of each shot. However, when filming we didn't follow these as much as intended as we wanted to experiment with different shots to see what actually looked best when properly filming. This meant that we would have more shots to choose from when it came to editing in order to get the best shots possible that would make our music video look better.

The first picture scene we filmed was when the couple are taking selfies in the living room. We set up the red head light and experimented with the natural light and the lights in the room to see what looked best. We directed our actors well by positioning them where we wanted them and then telling them exactly what to do before and during filming the shots. We also planned and laid out all the costumes for each scene so we could quickly get out actors changed before each new scene. This made the filming process run much smoother and quicker. When the female actress was holding up the phone we instructed her to move it up or down so we could position it correctly for what we viewing on the camera. We also told our male actor how to sit and exactly what he should be doing so he wasn't confused. As this was the first scene we continued to direct our actors like this throughout the shoot days in order to avoid any confusion and ensure they were doing what we had planned and intended for each scene. The shots we wanted to use for this scene was mainly close-ups and medium shots. These shots worked well however it was difficult to film other types of shots because of the nature of the scene. Therefore, we ensured that we made up for this when filming other scenes to use a wider range of shots. This location worked quite well to film in as we had a lot of space and a large seating area so we could play around with the positioning of the actors to see what looked best.

 The prom scene was the second scene we filmed. We got our actor dressed appropriately and went outside as this is where we had previously decided to film the scene. We did this in day light so didn't use any extra lighting. We decided to position the actors in front of nice car in order so it didn't look boring possibly in font of just a front door and also to make it the scene more fun and special as it meant to depict and exciting time for the actors as they are meant to be going to their prom. The natural light made the shot look more realistic however we were worried it may look to dark when editing it. Therefore, when editing we could change the brightness if it looked too dark. This shot worked well as it showed exactly what we wanted of the couple having prom pictures and then the male actor walking off to answer his phone and the female becoming confused and upset. 

Another shot we filmed outside was the hover-board scene. This also used natural light and some shots showed a slight flair from the light in the camera which we decided to include to make the scene look happier as it was bright and also more like a flashback as it also looked quite dreamy. When filming this scene we were able to use a range of shots because the location was on a street and there was a lot of space. This meant we could use more medium-long, long, panning and tracking shots which added variety to the shots we already had. This was useful when it came to editing to see what looked best in the final product.

We filmed two more picture scenes inside, the breakfast date scene and the video games scene. In the breakfast scene we used mainly close-up shots to show the necklace the boy was giving the girl and also the  emotions that can be identified from the actors facial expressions. This enables us to allow the audience to connect with our artist and feel empathy towards her. The lighting was natural to feel realistic. In the video games scene, we used medium and long shots to show all the actions of the actors as the scene is depicting their break up. We wanted to show their hand movements and body movements so the audience could understand what was happening in the scene without actually having to hear the actors talking. We decided to film this shot from different angles, in front of the sofa to show them sitting down playing the game and starting to argue and then behind the sofa to show when they are standing up. This was to show the audience what the actors are doing when they're sitting down and then when they stand up the scene moves to behind the sofa so you can see them properly having an argument and breaking up. 

Before filming the bedroom scenes we set up the bedroom by making the bed and laying the pictures out in order to show the actress reminiscing about her relationship with her first love. We then looked at out timeline for our music video and filmed the shots in the bedroom in the order of how they will appear in the final product. This made it easier to film as we had prepared what we wanted to film in advance and therefore didn't have to waste time deciding what to do. We filmed the artist from many angles and used natural light alongside the red head light to create a realistic and natural setting as well as a professional one. We used the whole space we had in order to capture as many shots as possible to make our video more engaging, exciting and interesting to watch. All the shots of the artist looking at the five different pictures were filmed in different positions in order to have a range of shots with the background positioned differently. We also filmed some other shots such as ripping pictures and throwing them in the air and a high angles shot of the artist surrounded by the pictures to use in other parts of the video to add to the narrative alongside the picture scenes. All these shots worked very well as we were able to fully capture the emotions of the artists and the main narrative of the music video which is the artist recollecting about her first relationship through their pictures together.    

 The studio scenes we filmed were to indicate the artists professional side rather than the video focussing entirely on her personal life and the narrative. We set up the studio with a microphone stand and a black background. To make the scenes more eye-catching and engaging, as well as to tie them in with the narrative scenes, we hung up pictures on string of the couple as a background for the artist to sing in front of. We filmed different shots in the studio such as close-ups, medium and long shots. We also did some panning and tracking shots where we panned up the artists body to her face to show her singing and tracking her whilst she walks along the set also singing. This was to add some diversity to our range of shots. The studio lighting was used in these shots so they appear more professional.

Our work as a team was strong. We worked well together and has good cooperation. We all took turns to film parts of the video and on each set we all had a chance to film. We also all took each others ideas into consideration and worked out together whose idea we should use such as repositioning  the actors, changing the lighting or  filming something we hadn't previously thought to film. 

Overall, I was very happy with our shoot days as I think we filmed everything we intended to film and more. I was happy how we ensured that we filmed all our shots from a few different angles so we could choose what looked best as well as filming many different types of shots so we had a wide range. the lighting worked well to show the realistic, natural parts of the video alongside the professional ones.